inside Ed Gein’s secluded, rundown Wisconsin farmhouse of horrors, the veil was forever lifted on the human psyche and we were forced to accept that evil lives inside us all. But who was the Mad Butcher of Plainfield, and what drove him to find comfort in the flesh of others?

Edward Theodore Gein was born to Augusta Crafter and George P. Gein on August 27, 1906, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. His parents, both natives of Wisconsin, had married on July 7, 1900, and their marriage produced Ed and his older brother, Henry G. Gein.

George Gein was a violent alcoholic who was frequently unemployed. Ed and his brother rejected their violent, aimless father, as did Augusta, who treated her husband like a nonentity.

Despite her deep contempt for her husband, the atrophic marriage persisted. Divorce was not an option due to the family’s religious beliefs. Augusta operated the small family grocery store and eventually purchased a farm on the outskirts of another small town, Plainfield, which became the Gein family’s permanent home.

Augusta moved to this desolate location to prevent outsiders from influencing her sons. Gein only left the premises to go to school and Augusta blocked any attempt he made to pursue friendships.

Besides school, he spent most of his time doing chores on the farm. Augusta, who was a fanatical Lutheran, drummed into her boys the innate immorality of the world, the evil of drink and the belief that all women (herself excluded) were prostitutes and whores.

According to Augusta, the only acceptable form of sex was for biological reproduction/procreation.

She reserved time every afternoon to read to them from the Bible, usually selecting graphic verses from the Old Testament dealing with death, murder and divine retribution.

With a slight growth over one eye and an effeminate demeanor, the young Gein became a target for bullies. Classmates and teachers recall other off-putting mannerisms such as seemingly random laughter, as if he were laughing at his own personal joke.

Despite his poor social development, he did fairly well in school, particularly in reading and the study of world economics.

By the time his father George died in 1940, Henry had begun to reject Augusta’s view of the world. He had even taken to bad-mouthing her within earshot of his mortified brother. In March 1944, the brothers found themselves in the middle of a brush fire on property they owned in a neighboring county.

When Ed ran to get the police, he told them he had lost sight of Henry, but then led them directly to his brother’s corpse. Although there was evidence Henry had suffered blunt trauma to his head, the local county coroner decided he died of asphyxiation while fighting the fire.

Gein then lived with his mother. Less than two years later, on December 29, 1945, Augusta died from a series of strokes, leaving her grief-stricken son alone on the isolated farmstead.

Police suspected Gein to be involved in the disappearance of a store clerk, Bernice Worden, in Plainfield on November 16, 1957. Upon entering a shed on his property, they made their first horrific discovery of the night: Worden’s corpse.

She had been decapitated, her headless body hung upside down by means of ropes at her wrists and a crossbar at her ankles. Most horribly, the body’s trunk was empty, the ribcage split and the body “dressed out” like that of a deer. These mutilations had been performed postmortem; she had been shot at close-range with a .22-caliber rifle.

Searching the house, authorities found:

Human skulls mounted upon the cornerposts of his bed

Human skin fashioned into a lampshade and used to upholster chair seats

Human skullcaps, apparently in use as soup bowls

A human heart (it is disputed where the heart was found; the deputies’ reports all claim that the heart was in a saucepan on the stove, with some crime scene photographers claiming it was in a paper bag)

The head of Mary Hogan, a local tavern owner, found in a paper bag

A ceiling light pull consisting of human lips

A “mammary vest” crafted from the skin of a woman’s torso

A belt made from several human nipples, among many other such grisly objects

Socks made from human flesh

Gein’s most notorious creations were an array of “shrunken heads.” Various neighborhood children — whom Gein occasionally babysat — had seen or heard of these objects, which Gein offhandedly described as relics from the South Seas, purportedly sent by a cousin who had served in World War II. Upon investigation, these turned out to be human facial skins, carefully peeled from cadavers and used by Gein as masks.

Gein eventually admitted under questioning that he would dig up the graves of recently buried middle-aged women he thought resembled his mother and take the bodies home, where he tanned their skin to make his macabre possessions.

One writer describes Gein’s practice of putting on the tanned skins of women as an “insane transvestite ritual”.

Gein denied having sex with the bodies he exhumed, explaining, “They smelled too bad.” During interrogation, Gein also admitted to the shooting death of Mary Hogan, who had been missing since 1954.

Shortly after his mother’s death, Gein decided he wanted a sex change, although it is a matter of some debate whether or not he was transsexual; by most accounts, he created his “woman suit” so he could pretend to be his mother, rather than change his sex.

Harold Schechter, an author of several true crime books, wrote a best-selling book about the Gein case called Deviant. In this book, Schechter mentions that Plainfield police officer Art Schley physically assaulted Gein during questioning by banging Gein’s head and face into a brick wall; because of this, Gein’s initial confession was ruled inadmissible.

Schley died of a heart attack at the age of 43 shortly before Gein’s trial. Many who knew him said he was so traumatized by the horror of Gein’s crimes and the fear of having to testify (notably about assaulting Gein) that it led to his early death. One of his friends said, “He was a victim of Ed Gein as surely as if he had butchered him.”

Gein was found mentally incompetent and thus unfit to stand trial at the time of his arrest, and was sent to the Central State Hospital (now the Dodge Correctional Institution) in Waupun, Wisconsin. Later, Central State Hospital was converted into a prison and Gein was transferred to Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1968

Following a lead while investigating the disappearance of local hardware store owner Bernice Worden on November 16th, 1957, police ended up on the Gein farm outside of Plainfield, Wisconsin. Eddie had bought antifreeze from the hardware store earlier that day. When investigators arrived to talk to him, they unwittingly stumbled upon the disturbing truth of Edward Gein’s isolated life.

Gein was arrested, and the state crime lab cleared out the grisly contents of his home. Boxes full of human remains were removed, including what was left of Bernice Worden, bar owner Mary Hogan who had disappeared several years earlier, and remains from numerous graves Gein had robbed.

For years after his mother’s death, Gein had been gathering body parts to create things inspired by the stories of cannibals and headhunters he was reading in pulp magazines.

Among the remains removed from his home were numerous creations, including masks made from real human faces, a female skin suit, a belt made of nipples, skull caps he had used as bowls, and a human skin lampshade.

The goal this time around was to capture all the locations significant to the area’s grisly past in photo and video, to document the passing of time.

As mentioned in previous writings about Ed Gein, it’s a dark fairy tale many of us grow up with here – it is ingrained in our collective consciousness.

This man, who could be any average small town character we have ever encountered, was digging up the freshly buried bodies of other people’s loved ones, dismembering them, and fashioning furniture, clothing and home decor from their remains.

McIntyre described this revelation:

Hollis saw many terrible things. He told me upon entering the home he saw a woman’s breast as the doorbell. Inside he saw a skin lampshade, a comforter/blanket made from human skin

furniture made of skin/breast, bloody gut buckets, a change purse made from a woman’s vagina, a belt with nipples on it. When Hollis saw the cauldron in my parents garage, he recognized it as the same Black Cauldron that he has seen Eds parents use to render hog fat on the farm.

He also recognized its as the same cauldron in one of the outbuilding sheds, and remembered Eds sinister use for it. He remembers the cauldron was covered in dry blood and guts, next to two barrels/tubs of bloody human entrails, intestines. 50 yrs.

later Hollis recognize the cauldron in my parents garage and turned white as a ghost. I asked him how does he know it was the same one covered in dry blood? He lifted his arm and said,”the hair on my arm stands straight up every time he looks at it in my parents garage.”

An abandoned house just down the road from the old Gein property. The architecture is nearly identical to the Gein house that burned down in March of 1958.

Ed Gein’s Cauldron: The Gruesome Story Behind the Ghoulish Relic

Ed Gein’s cauldron, a relic from the Wisconsin farmhouse where the infamous deviant committed his horrendous acts, will be featured this weekend on Zak Bagan’s new Travel Channel series Deadly Possessions.

The place where Ed Gein’s house once stood still feels as lonely and desolate as it was for him following the death of his mother in 1945.

Gein’s doctors determined he was sane enough to stand trial; he was found not guilty by reason of insanity by judge Robert H. Gollmar and spent the rest of his life in the hospital.

While Gein was in detention, his house burned to the ground. Arson was suspected. In 1958, Gein’s car, which he used to haul the bodies of his victims, was sold at public auction for a then-considerable sum of $760 to an enterprising carnival sideshow operator named Bunny Gibbons.

Gibbons called his attraction the “Ed Gein Ghoul Car” and charged carnival-goers 25 cents admission to see it.

On July 26, 1984, Ed Gein died of respiratory and heart failure due to cancer in Goodland Hall at the Mendota Mental Health Institute.

His gravesite in the Plainfield cemetery was frequently vandalized over the years; souvenir seekers would chip off pieces of his gravestone before the bulk of it was stolen in 2000. The gravestone was recovered in June 2001 near Seattle and is presently kept in storage.

The Gein Farm

An estate sale was held on March 30th, 1958 to sell off the remainder of Gein’s belongings. The house, which had become a tourist attraction and made the community uncomfortable, mysteriously burned the night before.

Emden Schey bought the farm, the outbuildings and the homestead site for $4,658. Over the years he tore down the outbuildings, planted trees, and eventually sold off most of the property.

The 40-acre homestead site, however, remained in the family. Schey passed it down to his grandson, Mike Fischer.

He wrote:

I’m not so sure that displaying an item that represents such evil is a good idea. What evil will it inspire? I wonder if I should have kept it, and planted flowers in it, only to be forgotten in time. Then there would be one less item in this world to remind us of the evil that lurks on the flipside of mankind’s good.